Surreal in the manner of...
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A chip-vendor punctuates the mawkish excoriations of this handsome text. For are we not fashionable? In our failings, in our dealings? The tone here follows the author's tiresomely coy expostulations in The Evening Standard - all about his life and how cool it is, with his city walks and famous friends and all - all carefully presented as being carelessly offered: a mock sardonic preachiness as only any old smack-hack can (and will) - endlessly... droningly... drawlingly... have on offer (ask his kids) - on and bleeding on... And automatically, inevitably, "surrealist" in the same way that New Improved Persil is "automatic" and also washes whiter and is surrealist in a way that is certified and gentrified, sanitised and CLEAN, a surrealism as safe as the real estate he owns as a hedge against the bad times. Thus do we learn of the grumblings of a Groucho Club Git (GCG), abrim with half-baked PCisms and the ruffled rafters of his incognito sprawl. Or should that be "drawl"? Which impends a kind of ending. The kind of ending which has Dear Author muttering in his jugs about "moral panics" and then BLING! - he gets stabbed in the bottie by an underclass junkie who neglected to read the statistics about knife crime peddled by hippie coppers or heed the limp lamentations of hippie magistrates. And there, dear reader, he lies. Picture the picture. Our Dear Author, on a patch of parched grass in Clapham. Bleeding to death through his apostrophes and phony wounds and bleeding heart... on and bleeding on...
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Absurd
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The language of this novel is richly textured and full of masterful metaphor. One example of many is: "Adams chose his words as fastidiously as a spinster selecting Scrabble tiles". Enjoyment of the masterful use of language was where the pleasure of this book ended for me, however. This is the kind of book that I think readers will either love or hate. The enigmatic and intriguing opening, where we are introduced to the bizarre culture of the country where the novel is set, sees the central character facing criminal charges for thoughtlessly flicking his cigarette butt onto an old man's head. For me, the book became less and less intriguing as absurdity was piled onto absurdity as the plot continued. One bizarre example is the towns in the desert where insurance policies are sold to multiple parties with conditions that the last of the policyholders to die collects the entire payout. Rampant killing ensues but the practice continues as it is supposedly beneficial to the economy.
The novel is largely allegorical in nature, but allegory is powerful when it is subtle. There is nothing subtle about demonstrating the arbitrary nature of culture by having natives in the desert wearing Austrian national costume to serve a psychologically disturbed anthropologist who has saved their tribe by inventing a culture for them when they had none. I can see how the imaginative nature of this story might appeal to some, but others will find the absurdity to be a bit too much.
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Self hits the road
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Will Self's uproariously horrible novel The Butt retains the author's recent forays into the creation of entire fictional territories but also adds a hefty dash of post 9/11 liberal paranoia. This is grand, interrogative satire, which revels in making the reader uncomfortable, questioning their every motivation beyond their initial notions of altruism or benevolence. The bulk of the novel takes the form of a road trip through a foreboding country reminiscent of both Australia and Iraq, undertaken by two men making recompense for their crimes, one apparently trivial, one (it is hinted) deadly serious. Frequently hilarious - in the way that Self provokes laughs which are often accompanied by a groan of self-knowledge - both novel and characters traverse difficult, occasionally terrifying territory, with Self's themes offering both comical and deadly straight response to writers such as Joseph Conrad and James Frazer. This reader's initial expectations - that the journey will illustrate how Conrad's fear of primitivism has just mutated into a rather tedious series of globalised bureaucracies - were confounded in the most fantastically horrible way as the characters make their way towards journey's end. There is something much more horrible and fundamental lurking at Self's heart of darkness. Self's prose is as masterful as ever and this excursion into bigger geographical territory is an exciting development. Highly recommended.
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